That's another tactic: accuse your victims. Fraud is rare among Social Security disability claimants, and the program is more likely to underpay claimants than over pay them. But Mulvaney cast the program in a larcenous light. "if you're on disability insurance and you're not supposed to be, you're not truly disabled," Mulvaney said, "we need you to go back to work."
Rep. Todd Rokita, who's leading the GOP charge to cut school breakfasts, also uses the fraud defense. Rokita claims he's "enhancing program integrity and fighting fraud, waste, and abuse." When you don't want to admit you're depriving needy kids of something they need, it's easier to accuse those kids of fraud.
Recently a Republican House member, Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, was unable to respond coherently when asked if "every American is entitled to eat." Smith stumbled over his words, mumbling about "nutrition" being "very important" before conceding that food is "essential." But Smith said he was still willing to cut food stamps.
Poverty of SpiritThere is, indeed, a "poverty of spirit" at work here. But it's not found among poor people, or among the disabled, or in struggling rural and inner-city communities.
The real poverty of spirit lives in the boardrooms and living rooms of Republican-backing CEOs, who reward themselves with record increases in their own compensation while the rest of the country suffers. It lives in the tortured, self-justifying and selfish logic of Ben Carson, Mick Mulvaney, and Adrian Smith. It lives in the sanctimonious sensitivity of Tucker Carlson and in that gelatinous embodiment of orgiastic self-indulgence that is President Donald Trump. And it lives in the political party who gives these spiritually impoverished impulses a home.
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